


Follow as the Crow Flies

by writerkat



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Pre-Canon, Worldbuilding, vuvalini culture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-07
Updated: 2018-05-07
Packaged: 2019-05-03 11:29:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,878
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14568075
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/writerkat/pseuds/writerkat
Summary: The life of a Crow Fisher always was, and always will be, a simple one.





	Follow as the Crow Flies

A life's story begins just as many of them have before and shall continue to begin. With screaming and wailing.

A mother lies back against the furs and sweats with exertion as she rests from the massive effort of expelling her child to the world. She catches her breath as her sisters aiding her examine the babe. Already disappointment sweeps through her when she hears the muffled disappointment and consoling from the women around her.

A Boy. All of that effort, wasted on birthing a Boy.

One of them comes and places a hand on her shoulder, attempting to comfort her to no avail. This is her third child, and her third boy. She begins to wonder what the point of having her own children is if none of them can be kept.

Still, she does not complain. Though she feels her disappointment heavily as she cares for the infant in its early days. Her eyes full of sorrow as the Boy robs her breast of milk which could have gone to a healthy daughter as he nurses. If only it had been a girl, she thinks sadly. But it was not, and she tells herself she will not be attached.

Even when she one day wipes a tear when she awakens to find the crib beside her bed empty.

–

A Fisher approaches the silty shore on his stilts, slowly lowering himself down the warped branches of a tree to meet the woman. He bows his head upon approach, back bent forward slightly as well from the lifelong warp formed in posture from traversing on four stilts. The woman approaches resolutely as she looks like someone who has the unpleasant duty of carrying away excrement. The Fisher knows his duty. He holds out his arms, taking the Boy from her and into his grasp.

He needs not be told to be dismissed. They never want a man in their sight long. He turns around and carries the Boy with him, scaling with practiced precision up the tree. She leaves as soon as he begins climbing.

This is easier, really. For everyone involved. First births are usually harder. Young mothers who insist upon coming along tripping on doubt and beginning to plead and beg for the chance to keep this baby boy. Please this baby just one boy one exception it's _her_ baby please. The elder who invariably comes along holding her back as the man retrieving it ignores the wails and carries the infant off.

Still better than the old days. Better than when babies were left by the shores without warning. Better than baby boys left wailing with hunger and thirst for a mother who will never come back to him and men who are too far into the swamp to hear it.

A young mother killed herself once. Snuck back to the swamps and hung herself with grief after finding her boy far too late for him to be found. Picked over by the crows and half submerged in a mud puddle, still trapped in its swaddling. That was when things changed.

This Boy is lucky, the Fisher thinks as he carefully tucks it into a carrying pack under his cape of feathers, to be born in such a time. When the women were kind enough to inform the men to be there when they delivered another one to their numbers. He sloshes through the swamp with the Boy on his back now.

The Boy gurgles with happiness when a group of crows suddenly take flight, the light tinted sapphire for a moment as the light through the overcast goes through their feathers. Another good.

This one was a lucky Boy indeed.

–

The Boy learns from a young age what all boys do. How to climb trees and find crow's nests. How to weave nets from grasses and fibers to catch the crows. How to pluck the crows' gorgeous feathers and prepare them for eating. How to prepare a small coal in their pouch for a smoldering fire for warmth and to cook the crow. How to weave crow feathers into worn coverings. He learns quickly.

His infant swaddling is almost frayed to bits, the Boy's is. Soon enough he will be made to discard it. When some crow will take it for its' own and use it as nesting for its' own young. As is the natural cycle. Once it is discarded, he will be given a net of his own. He will be honored with the first kill and the first taste of crow brought by his own hands.

Much like all young boys do, the Boy wonders at the Place Beyond The Nests, The Place From Whence Sweet Water Flows, The Place Of Plant Food, The Place Of No Brothers, The Place Of Mothers. Where he catches glimpses of green through the blue of the haze when sitting in the highest of branches.

The truth is told. It is the place where they all came from. And it is the place where they may never return. There are those who are wistful, hoping they may one day be allowed back to that place. There are those who are bitter, resentful of the women who own it and don't allow them there. The Boy falls into a middling category, much like most of the Fishers fall to.

The Green Place, to him, is simply a place to be imagined of when he has known no place but the Place Of Nests.

–

The Boy sits with worry as he tends to the Fisher who took charge of him and a younger boy who was taken in after him. On their platforms between some of the thicker trees, he places wet strips of moss onto their hot foreheads, watching with growing concern as they grow sicker and sicker.

The swamp is no place for the ill, he knows. Too many he has seen become crow food simply from an untreated cut or drinking without bubbling the water over a coal. He is urged to leave them before he falls to the illness, but he is determined not to.

The crows provide them with sustenance, and they are respected for that. But they will do him and his ilk no good when they are sweating away their lives. The crows watch and wait for them to breathe their last. The crows are like the sun and the swamp and the rain. They are neither good nor bad. They simply are. If any of them cannot survive, the crows shall use them to survive. It is that simple.

He is indecisive as he goes out to rewet the moss in a puddle. What is a lone Boy like himself to do against the will of illness?

His answer comes, as usually happens, in the form of a crow. The mass of black feathers stares at him from the part of the silt where the path to the Green Place is.

The crows are scavengers. They take what they need from where they need it. They are not mere animals. He has seen them play and care for the nests of their parents, as was pointed out to him. It was why they were so clever and had to be respected in order to be caught.

The Boy has eaten the crows. He must now be like the crows, if he wishes for those he cares about to survive the next sunrise.

–

All the Boy brings with him is a waterskin and a small pouch. He has learned how to scramble through the tall grasses without alerting a snake. He can do so as he sneaks about the greenery. After a whole life of the world tinted blue, all of the green is a bit dizzying. But he focuses.

He finds the closest source of sweet water he can find and fills up the skins. Water clean and clear and far from the silty, muddy water he has grown up drinking which leaves stains around his mouth.

Next is grasses. Things sometimes left by the women when the men have saved up enough meat and feathers to do earn it, when it is wanted at all. The Boy pulls as many of these as he can find, and steals some of the crops from the earth. If he wants them to survive, he must be ruthless like the crow. No regard for the ones who tended to it.

He makes to leave when he finds someone staring at him. A Girl.

Boy and Girl stare at one another with almost shock. The Boy has never seen a Girl before, only women. The Girl has never seen a male before in her life, only the horror stories the Mothers tell of them.

She is on him with a knife, grunting but not screeching in alarm about the thief in their paradise. He stumbles back, torn. To lay hand on a woman, even this Girl, should be death. But she wants his death regardless. He cannot fight back.

It is only after she comes at him again, barely missing his face with the knife, that he is able to run for his life. He flees with the prizes like a crow taking flight. She still does not scream of the thief.

It is only once he has returned to his swamp that the Boy realizes he is bleeding. The touch of his own fingers tells him his ear is cleaved neatly between the lobe and the shell. It doesn't matter, he tells himself as he cleans the blood with silty water, not daring to waste any of his hard earned water on cleaning himself. He has succeeded.

He makes his way to the Fisher and the other boy, finding the Fisher up and attempting to care for the younger.

The Fisher slaps him across the face for his recklessness when he explains his absence.  
Then hugs him tightly and thanks him for his bravery.

The fever is broken from them both. The Boy feels no regret for following the ways of the crow.

–

The Boy wakes up one night with a bittersweet feeling of elation and humiliation. He knows not why he feels this way, save his clothes being dirtied in the night. The Fisher simply tells him that he is a man now, and that he will be experiencing what he calls Family soon. The Boy doesn't understand, but nods as if he does.

He soon learns that Family is something that happens when the Fisher brings him to the silt shore of the swamp, and they meet with a woman who brought with her a Girl. The woman pulls apart his mouth to look at his teeth and pulls back his cape of feathers to look at his scrawny body fed by plant scraps and crow meat. He is skinny, but healthy as any other boy.

The girl focuses on his ear. While the woman is distracted and the Fisher has his head bowed, she reaches forward and takes hold of the free lobe of his ear, moving it back and forth on its flap while frowning with recognition. When the Boy dares raise his eyes, he realizes that this Girl is playing with his ear because she recognizes her own handiwork. She says nothing to the woman, just stares bemusedly.

Negotiations finish quickly, so it seems. And the Boy experiences Family for the first time.

He will experience it many times after this. Sometimes with the Girl, sometimes with other girls, sometimes even with women, but only when they call. And the Girl is his first.

Family isn't so bad. Nice, even. But it leaves him feeling some sense of emptiness. Not even the emptiness from lack of food, as he is always given some from the Green place after it happens each time.

It may have something to do with how his heart twists when he one day sees the Girl with a woman as an older fisher takes a baby boy away from them. The Girl is fighting and screaming and begging with the stony faced woman calmly explaining away her protests while tears stream down her face. All he can do is look to the sky and focus on the crows above as he feigns not hearing the Girl's sorrow while the fisher carefully spirits the baby off into the swamp.

The next time he sees the Girl, it's for another instance of Family. She threatens that she will kill him if he makes her have another boy.

He lives and doesn't see her for another Family again, so he assumes that she has a girl. He's happy for her, if nothing else. The boy she had who was brought to the swamp grows attached to him. He doesn't mind that at all.

–

The Boy is considered a Man by the time the raiders come. The crows take flight and some fishers are killed as they roll on through. Either pushed into the swamp without chance for breath by their heavy trucks, or shot clear off their stilts by their powerful guns. The Man survives with a few of the young boys. The old Fisher is shot dead and becomes crow food, to his sorrow.

There is what sounds like a great screaming of women as the vehicles roll off. But what are they to do?

For the first time in a while, there are a good number of women gathered at the silty shores. Survivors of the raid who mourn those who have been taken from them. The men don't join in their lamenting. There are many dead among them, but none taken. They do not know the pain that the women are feeling, so they stay away with heads bowed. The child of the Girl, now a Woman, clings onto his bloodied feathered cape with trembling hands. The Man dares to look toward the group of women standing together in a daze. She doesn't see him, and she's clutching what looks to be the sleeve of a girl's shirt, but with no shirt or girl attached to it.

He feels numbly sorry for her, but doesn't voice the sentiment. Not as if she would accept it anyway.

He takes the child's hand and is one of the first to return to the swamp. Already the crows have begun to rebuild their nests, they must do the same.

–

The swamps growing foul is the first sign of the coming end of prosperity. Always the swamp has been full of mud and insects and the like. But when the bugs begin dropping dead, and the water creatures begin to avoid the water, they all know something is wrong.

It starts in little things. Many animals avoid where they once thrived. A fisher who dipped his feet in the water to rest is now groaning in agony at the intense, blood filled pustules which adorn his feet. Until eventually a young boy who dared drink the water too far from the sweet water inlet is coughing up blood by morning. Mentions are made of this to the women, but they pay it little mind.

That is, until the Green Place starts to wither. Whispers come through the swamps of fertile places going dry or turning to marsh. Children once healthy laying with bellies so distended that they might burst. Children are so vulnerable. There are no longer bouts of Family as both sides decline to take any part in it. No energy to do so, and no desire to see any more sad, small bodies.

Many of the men attempt to give the women some sustenance from the crows. No matter how bad the swamp gets, the crows always remain. Many of the women accept. The Man and the boy who follow him give the Woman the biggest of the crows they captured. The Woman thanks them for the kindness, and in return gives them some fresher water. It tastes vaguely of the silt from the Man's time as a Boy.

The Green Place worsens. Until it comes to resemble the swamps of the Man's youth. Though it quickly grows as toxic as his home swamp is now.

It's when the crows move into the Green Place that all of them know it is lost. The crows know what places are best to scavenge.

They are the best at knowing what is dead.

–

The Woman is gone one day. Along with all the rest. The Man and his boy are not altogether surprised. It was a long time coming. The women never did care for the swamp. They never cared for the men or the crows or the murky waters that held their livelihood.

In the end, they left it all to the men. The remnants of their paradise. Perhaps a few resented it, but most saw it as simple happenstance. Some suggested that the crows were responsible. Providing for they who hunted them with respect. They were usually ignored by those who knew the truth. The crows didn't care for any of them. They just were.

Just as it was the life of a crow to follow where they could scavenge and live, it was the life of a Crow Fisher to follow the crows.

 


End file.
